The cost of Pharmaceuticals

X

Xapz

Veteran X
[Public Service Announcement for the sake of my fellow Pharmacy Technicians]
If you think they cost too much, then don't take them.
Don't bitch at your pharmacy tech because you have to pay 15 dollars a pill for the drugs that wouldn't otherwise be available.

Without pharmaceutical companies, your choices are as follows:
1) Don't take the drugs

With them your choices are as follows:
1) Don't take the drugs
2) Pay for the drugs and take them

Without those high prices, you wouldn't have the drugs available. Yes, you heard me. It's an inherent necessity for the drug prices to be so high in order for you to get the pills. Without the mad profit to be made by pharmaceutical entrepreneurs, you wouldn't have access to all the drugs you do.


[End rant]
 
Also, it is not like they are baking a goddamn cake. When producing some of the specilized drugs used now the production can be very elaborate and costly.
 
My dream job would be to own a pharmacuetical company. Next to extremely succesful high-tech companies, these are so fuckign rich it's unbelievable.

Say somone takes a medicine that cost 50 bucks a month. 12x50 = 600 dollars a year.

Now say you have a million people who take this drug. That's 600,000,000 dollars right there.

The problem is it takes forever to develop a drug, and it's really really really expensive.
 
herbtown said:
i rarely get sick and need medz but if i do, it's not nearly as costly as that.....i dunno :shrug:
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Cost isn't just seen in how much you pay when you go to the pharmacy...
think about how much you pay for insurance. A significant part of that is to cover costs they would pay for medications.
 
other nations limit drug prices. therefore, to make up the costs, the drug companies make us pay inflated prices.
 
Hedge said:
My dream job would be to own a pharmacuetical company. Next to extremely succesful high-tech companies, these are so fuckign rich it's unbelievable.

Say somone takes a medicine that cost 50 bucks a month. 12x50 = 600 dollars a year.

Now say you have a million people who take this drug. That's 600,000,000 dollars right there.

The problem is it takes forever to develop a drug, and it's really really really expensive.
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Well, not really much accuracy here.
First of all, very few drugs cost only 50 bucks a month.
Secondly, there are no drugs that a million people take every month.
It costs on average somewhere around 500k to develop a drug (purely informational costs)
The manufacturing costs, I do not know.

A more realistic number would be:
20,000 people taking the drug once a day for 6 months, for 4 years of production.
So 20k * 30 pills per month * 6 months * 4 years = 14.4 million pills.
I've seen drugs from 50 cents to 500 dollars.
Most i'd say are around 3-4 dollars.
So you're looking at somewhere around 40 million dollars over 4 years for a successful drug.

That's for very successful drugs, and those costs for informational are only so low because they have large teams which work on multiple drugs at the same time. If you're alone, the money is in compounding (another issue altogether)
 
Musashi said:
other nations limit drug prices.
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Which is why the US has been referred to as a 'pill culture' because we have so many pills available (good or bad depending on your PoV)
 
Musashi said:
other nations limit drug prices. therefore, to make up the costs, the drug companies make us pay inflated prices.
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"One drug company, Merck, pocketed more in pure profit than all of the airline companies on the Fortune 500 list, and bested the entertainment and construction industries as well. Most significantly, the pharmaceutical's 18.9% profit-to-revenue ratio was, by far, the highest margin of any industry in the nation."

Yeah, sounds like they're really struggling just to stay in business.
 
Yeah I know someone who's dad recently signed a contract for 250,000,000 $$$$ from a big drug company who bought his patent.

I would imagine the big bucks come from mass selling drugs to hospitals or developing a vaccine.

Anyway Xapz what would one need to learn in order to go into developing drugs? Medicine (ie become a doctor and focus on research), or whatever Nolt is doing.
 
I wish I had money invested in Glaxo, they have a lot of popular meds on the market.

if they would fund a few more studies, they could get wellbutrin indicated for low female sex drive and their stock would go even higher.
 
People bitch about everything. Its our god given right as americans to bitch at everything.

If we don't bitch, the terrorists have won.
 
Yellow said:
"One drug company, Merck, pocketed more in pure profit than all of the airline companies on the Fortune 500 list, and bested the entertainment and construction industries as well. Most significantly, the pharmaceutical's 18.9% profit-to-revenue ratio was, by far, the highest margin of any industry in the nation."

Yeah, sounds like they're really struggling just to stay in business.
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So drug companies are supposed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on researching new drugs, many of which never make it to market, without any prospect of making money? Ok that makes sense. We should just put price and profit caps on new drugs and all remove all incentive to research and produce them in the first place. That's the ticket.
 
Anyway what do you think about nanotechnology. I've read a few articles that nanotechnology based drugs are what's gonna be the next 'big hit'.

You know, you cut yourself, you pop a pill and within a few minutes it's all healed. That kind of shit.
 
stone said:
So drug companies are supposed to spend hundreds of millions on researching new drugs, many of which never make it to market, without any prospect of making money? Ok that makes sense. We should just put price and profit caps on new drugs and all remove all incentive to research and produce them in the first place. That's the ticket.
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Without any prospect of making money? Maybe you should reread that, because the pharmaceutical industry generates more pure profit than any other industry in the United States. If you're not aware, profit is measured after R&D costs are accounted for. As an added bonus, US taxpayers now get to generate more profit for the industry in the form of the prescription drug benefit, all of which I'm sure you find perfectly acceptable.
 
I want all my computer data stored in DNA, and if I want to do backups, I just feed it a mitosis-inducing pill.

I dont know the exact figure, but DNA could copy like 10^234532 terabytes in like 2 secs

EDIT, I just realized what a faggot I was for saying DNA undergoes mitosis. what I ment to say was replication
 
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